Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s scholarship has been central to postcolonial history and historiography, from his early work with the Subaltern Studies collective and the publication of Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (1989) to Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000; new edition 2007) and Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (2002).

Chakrabarty is Laurence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and Associate Faculty of the Department of English. He is a founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, a co-editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He is a Contributing Editor to Public Culture, has served on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review, and is one of the editors of the new series South Asia Across the Disciplines, which is published by a consortium of the university presses at Chicago, Columbia, and California.

His Katz lecture on the science of climate change and its impact on historical thinking draws on a new book project.

Colloquium

November 18, 2009 - 9:00 AM - Communications 202

Join Dipesh Chakrabarty, Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecturer in the Humanities for Fall 2009, in a discussion of his current research. Chakrabarty is Laurence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.

Chakrabarty’s scholarship has been central to postcolonial history and historiography, from his early work with the Subaltern Studies collective and the publication of Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (1989) to Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000; new edition 2007) and Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (2002).

Chakrabarty’s research is currently focused on three areas: he is finishing a book on the history of objectivity in history – much of which is focused on the Indian historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958); he has a book project in-process on the implications of the science of climate change for historical and political thinking, from which he drew the foundation of his Katz lecture (see also Chakrabarty’s essay in Critical Inquiry, Winter 2009); and he is working long-term towards a book on democracy and political thought in South Asia.